I have not had this much fun in years! We are in the midst of a pivotal shift in how companies manage their product portfolios and a new approach is emerging that finally links rapid top-down executive modeling with detailed bottom-up planning.

The company and product executives I meet with all agree that the old Project Portfolio Management (PPM) approaches are dead. The fact that they are only 10-15 years old show how fast things have changed.

Once, it was enough to be first to market. Now, the innovation game is more complicated with multi-layered products and new go-to-market strategies that require a careful coordination of complex dependencies, compatibilities, and timing. The dynamic nature of these dependencies mean critical portfolio decisions need to be made on-the-fly, when data becomes available; and need to be revisited as conditions change.

In our opinion here at Accept, successful portfolios today require a broader approach that breaks out of the confinement of single departmental silos and instead integrates departmental, product, corporate, and IT portfolios into one unified enterprise portfolio. We believe the innovation portfolio game has changed.

Accept Corporation and AIPMM (Association of International Product Marketing and Management) are conducting a joint study to find out where companies are struggling the most today in their current portfolio planning practices and approaches. I am looking forward to the analysis as I am sure there will be some telling facts.

As we continue our poll series to understand the priorities and challenges that product executives face, I wanted to share the results from the fourth poll. This poll was focused on portfolio management and the challenges faced. There were again over 200 responses representing a solid cross-section of product management, sales, marketing and development roles across all types of industries and geographies.

The question was: What are your biggest product portfolio management challenges?